Freeway City picks up where Streetcar CIty leaves off -looking at the rise to dominance of private automobiles and the highway systems that fed them. The film begins with the film’s director, Brad Masi, walking through one of his favorite urban nature preserves - the Shaker Lakes. A place to meander and marvel at a rich diversity of bird-life, Masi’s quiet thoughts are troubled by the realization that an eight lane highway and interchange would have blasted through this park. The remainder of the film is focused on how the seeming inevitability of a freeway was able to be stopped.

The film focuses on the “Freeway Fights” of 1960’s Cleveland. After World War II, an overflowing trough of federal funding motivated rapid development of urban neighborhoods and green space in favor of highways and "blight removal”. The film looks at what happened to the rich African-American community along Scovil Avenue that was disappeared through the development of freeways and urban renewal projects that eliminated whole neighborhoods.

The destruction of freeways and the accompanying hollowing out of Cleveland and its inner-ring suburbs came to a head in the 1960’s as the costs of such developments on city-life became more visible. Enter Mayor Carl Stokes, the first African-American Mayor of a major U.S. city who assumes the reigns of the city at the peak of suburbanization. He leverages the municipal power of the city to fight four planned freeways that especially threatened African-AMerican neighborhoods on Cleveland’s east-side.

Up from Cleveland in the Heights, a ferocious grassroots movement that began in the early 1960’s gathered steam and publicly challenged the authority of County Engineer Al Porter who had largely unchallenged authority to draw up freeway routes. A the center of the organizing in the Heights was the preservation of the Shaker Lakes parklands and the establishment of the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes- located in the cross-hairs of a large highway interchange.

The film looks at the legacy of the Freeway Fights 50 years later and the ways in which the struggle blended racial equality with an emerging ecological consciousness. What are the challenges that Cleveland faces today with the domination of automobiles in city streets and what is being done to create a more socially cohesive and environmentally sustainable transportation system in the future?

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